Scotch Scones
1¼ cups rolled oats put through food chopper 2 tablespoons Mazola 2/3 cup scalded milk 2 tablespoons Karo, Red or Blue Label 1½ cups bread flour 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 teaspoon salt Put the oatmeal in a small mixing bowl, add the Mazola, Karo and hot milk. When cold, add the remaining ingredients sifted together. Mix, turn onto a floured board and divide into two portions. Roll each into a round cake, one-half inch thick, cut into four triangles, bake on a hot griddle oiled with Mazola, , turning only once. Allow about fifteen minutes for the cooking. .
Serve with butter, plain or with any marmalade or jelly.
A griddle scone in the Scottish manner, rewritten to sell corn oil, corn syrup and cornstarch. It works, but three of the four brand names need translating and the griddle heat is the whole game.
- The hinge: moderate griddle heatThe hinge: griddle heat -- the recipe says a hot griddle, but half-inch scones given about fifteen minutes want no more than moderate heat. Too hot and you get a scorched crust over raw oat paste; turn once at the halfway point and leave them alone.
- Mazola, Karo, ArgoMazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil substitutes at the same volume. Karo was sold under several coloured labels in this period, of differing colour and strength; ordinary light corn syrup is the usual modern stand-in, and 2 tablespoons of honey behaves similarly here. Argo and Kingsford's were both Corn Products brands of plain cornstarch.
- "Put through food chopper"A hand-cranked meat grinder was the standard tool for cracking rolled oats into a coarse meal. A food processor does it in short pulses — stop while the texture is still gritty, not floury.
- Why it must go coldThe oats are scalded with hot milk to soften them, and the baking powder cannot go in until that mixture has cooled; the recipe says "when cold", or the leavening will spend its lift in the bowl.
- Bread flourPeriod bread flour was the strong, high-protein grade. All-purpose flour gives a more tender scone and is the better choice unless you want chew; measure it 1 1/2 cups spooned and levelled, about 190 g.
- Leavening looks highThree teaspoons of baking powder is generous measured against the 1 1/2 cups of flour alone, though the ground oats add considerably to the dry bulk and bring no gluten to trap gas, so the leavening is doing real work.
- YieldTwo rounds cut in four gives eight triangles, enough for four at supper. They are best within an hour of the griddle and stale quickly; split and re-toast anything left.
Scones cooked on a griddle rather than in an oven are the older Scottish form — the flat round is a bannock, the wedges cut from it are farls, and oatmeal rather than wheat was the traditional base in much of Scotland where oats grew and wheat did not. What makes this version American is the company behind the book: Mazola, Karo, Argo and Kingsford's were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and promotional cookbooks like this one existed to move a Scottish supper bread into the vocabulary of a household that had a bottle of corn syrup on the shelf. The scalded-oat method, softening the meal in hot liquid before mixing, is genuinely traditional; the corn oil and cornstarch are the sales pitch.